The Sands of Kalahari

by William Mulvihill

  Some days later, on the other side of the peak, he discovered a way down to the desert floor. It was a dangerous descent but he took his time and moved down the hundreds of feet. None of them had ever been here; they had dismissed it as a source of food but he knew that it should be explored.

  He rested at the bottom, in the shadows of great fallen slabs that had once been part of the massif. He killed a long yellow lizard and ate it uncooked. It was a reward he was entitled to, he told himself. He needed more food than the others. He was the hunter.

  He remembered the eagle’s cave. It was two or three miles from where he was; hundreds of feet up. He began to walk toward it, around the bulge of the cliff. The sand was extremely fine here, desiccated granite with a large proportion of mica. His feet sank into it and after a quarter of a mile he was forced to rest and drink some water. It was more desolate here than in the most remote parts of the canyons; the desert closed in, pressed against him; the sun gave no quarter; above the sheer rock threatened.

  But he kept on. He had told himself that he was going to locate the cave and stand beneath it. He would go on if it consumed the rest of the day and all his strength… . He walked on through the heavy sand and after a long time he located the white splash high on the cliff overhead, saw the great bird fly away and vanish in the distance.

  The unspoken thought that he had toyed with, the idea that he might climb to the cave, would never again enter his mind. No human could climb the glass-like rock. The cave above was safe from all wingless creatures.

  He came to the base of the cliff and started. There was life here, strange gruesome plants growing in the granite sand, fertilized by eagle droppings. From one rock a stalagmite of white dung rose. A thick-leafed plant grew near it, finding life somehow in the impossible environment. And everywhere there were bones and splinters of bones, the debris, the garbage from above. There were prints in the sand, of hyena and jackal perhaps, of land scavengers who came to investigate and steal from the scraps. The sand was covered with ants too, strange white ants, slow-moving, disgusting. And there was a smell that penetrated the very rock, a smell that seemed ancient, poisonous. But yet, in the dung and among the decay of old feathers and ancient filth, there was life. The dung had altered the chemistry of the sterile soil and brought alien seed to it; things lived here now, alone but alive.

  He turned and walked away.

  The desert was quiet except for the hum of invisible insects. There was a beauty here, O’Brien thought, a wildness that stirred him: the sharp cliffs, the great black peak, the jumbled rock piles and the stunted grass that grew in the hard soil and heavy sand. It was a sparse and difficult place which reminded him of the family ranch in California where he’d spent the first winter after the war. It was high in the sierra and the snow came early and stayed until spring. He’d spent four months there, alone except for the workmen, hunting deer and roaming the great timbered slopes. Once he’d tracked a mountain lion, shot it through the head and brought the skin back to show the cow hands who worked the place. He liked the snow and the silent places, the cold wind in his face.

  After that winter things had gone wrong. The two terrible years of his marriage, the fights and brief reconciliations and the long bitter divorce proceedings which spilled over into the newspapers and caused another rupture with his family, his staid brothers and quiet sisters. He had simply married the wrong girl; a girl who did not love him and was at once puritanical and rapacious. Correcting the mistake had left him bitter and humiliated. He could not trust women afterwards. He saw them as a breed apart, willing to destroy themselves for the symbols of luxury and status.

  He went to South America and tried to forget it all in wild living and constant movement but he grew weary of the Latin temperament and came back to the States. There was nothing for him to do. He refused to work. He considered it absurd for the son of a millionaire to work: it was needless pretense. And politics annoyed him. He did not believe in democracy; he found compromise unbearable; he did not enjoy popularity. Boredom finally drove him to New York and he became involved in Society and stock speculation. He lived wildly, squeezing each day like a lemon and tossing it away. He kept two mistresses, each unknown to the other, and spent his days in dubious transactions. He was not repelled by the idea or fact of hoax and fraud. It was all a monstrous joke. He did not understand poverty, remained unimpressed by wealth, and the whole idea of buying and selling invisible shares of ownership of invisible and drab business seemed like some adult game. And it was simple to win. You made sure you would win, you removed the gamble and chance and made your own luck. He had capital and boldness and others had the connections and knew the loopholes and legal tricks. He made money. He had fun.

  He went to Europe a couple of times, spent a winter in London tasting a new environment. One summer he went to Italy and met a girl who claimed to be from Vassar and he took her to Cannes and Biarritz. The years passed. He was handsome and rich and secure but he was not happy. It was all so easy… .

  CHAPTER IV

  GRIMMELMANN was falling asleep, lying on the soft white sand in the cool cave. He thought of Sturdevant and the desert; he thought of the Herero War again… .

  It was shameful like all wars the white man fought against the simple peoples of the world. And the guilt was on him, not on the Fatherland. He’d killed men for no reason.

  All the fighting, all the campaigning; it was all mixed up in his mind now, fragments of days and nights of thirst and fear. There was one time when they went out to make a wide swing toward the Bechuanaland border to try to cut off the retreat of many hundreds of Hereros with their thousands of cattle. That time they hadn’t seen one of the enemy. Five weeks in the bush and not one sign of them. Then one of them had sighted some native homes, giant beehive-like huts made out of thorn branches and dung. They had set fire to them and moved on but the heavy smoke followed them and made them sick and they had all vomited in the hot sand, trying to get away from the smoke.

  There was never enough to eat. If they’d had the proper food the campaigning wouldn’t have been too bad, for they were all young fellows, eager and strong. With the proper food many of the sick men wouldn’t have died and the rest of them would have lasted longer. Instead the pancakes were made from flour and water which was milky with lime or bitter with the salts in it. Now and then when an ox collapsed from pulling the heavy wagons there was fresh meat. The animals were slaughtered and eaten before the meat went bad but nobody enjoyed it because it was too warm, too fresh.

  A strange war with the enemy almost always invisible. Even the militia and the Boers on horseback never saw much of them. They were always stumbling through the sand, chasing men they never saw, men whose crime was that they were black and owned fine cattle and would not part with them. The German government had claimed all the land and told the Herero they had to pay taxes in cattle. The Herero refused. The war began.

  In the morning it was still cool and they marched through wet grass. Then the sun came up and they fought through hot sand, three or four hundred men usually and twenty or thirty Cape wagons pulled by half-mad oxen fighting the flies and the heavy load harnessed to their dumb backs. Thornbushes reached out and tore their uniforms; their cheap boots cracked and dried out and began falling apart. The men all looked alike now: scraggly beards on young-old faces that were gaunt and yellow. Their coats grew greasy. They began to neglect their rifles. They were all infected from the thorns. Now and then a man started to cry and nobody could stop him. There were suicides.

  The war finally narrowed down to the possession of a single water hole. There was a real battle with the Herero firing at them with captured rifles, charging them with spears and clubs. They won. The natives retreated to the east with their women and children, their cattle; a whole nation fleeing through the wilderness like the Israelites escaping from the Pharaoh’s wrath.

  They slumped to the sand and slept among the dead and wounded. Officers and noncoms bellowed but the
y lay in the sand and pretended to be dead. In the morning they dug a mass grave and ate breakfast. Then they collected all the horses and the strongest of them became mounted infantry. They followed the Herero.

  It was not difficult. The path of the retreating nation was a hundred yards wide. They followed it on the sick horses and soon they began to come upon the refuse of the flight: blankets and women’s trinkets, utensils, broken weapons, iron pots and all sorts of tools which had been looted from German farmers. They came upon men dead of wounds they had received at the water hole. They began to find live men who sat and stared at them uncaring—men and women and children dying of thirst and despair. And everywhere dead and dying cattle, some of them wild from the heat and thirst, crazy and dangerous. Dead dogs. Dead horses. Goats. Babies. And worst of all, women sitting in the sand or lying in it, some alive, others dead with their living young clasped to them… .

  A dying nation. Stink and flies and calves bellowing for their mothers. In the middle of the day they came to the first watering place but the Herero had filled it with corpses and slaughtered cattle. They pulled out the bodies, one by one, but in the end there was only a little bloody water in the bottom. They dug deeper in the sand. Nothing. The sand was too hot now to lie on. There was no pasturage. So they moved on and came to a group of the oldest women he had ever seen. They sat in a circle and stared blankly at some bone objects before them.

  One of them was trying to chant a prayer but no sound came from the moving lips.

  Once a young boy with a spear stood in their path. They began shooting at him but mounted as they were, too weak to hold a rifle properly, they could not bring him down. A dozen shots, two dozen, and still the boy stood waiting, unharmed. The men began to laugh, cheer. They put their rifles away. Then one of the officers dismounted and walked toward the boy with his pistol. He aimed carefully and fired. The boy fell. They stopped the crazy laughing and went on.

  They came to another water hole and this too had been spoiled by the enemy. It was a deep well and it was filled to the top with dead oxen. Somehow he had found a way down through the great warm bodies, slippery with blood. There was water at the bottom, bitter with blood and salts. He filled some canteens and crawled upward through the wedged bodies, praying that they would not slip and trap him forever in the stifling hole.

  They made coffee. Other men crawled down into the well. Someone found a great nest made by weaverbirds and they tore it apart and fed it to the crazed horses along with cow dung and thorn branches.

  They started back along the path they had followed; they were in no condition to pursue and fight the enemy. Now they were as weak and terrified as the Herero. Horses dropped dead and men pitched forward on the sand; every half mile cost a horse. The walking men gathered in a group and tried to stay on their feet. The night went and morning came; the unit was a long line of stumbling men, none of them quite sane, fighting the terrible lethargy within them, occupied with the greatest of all ambitions—to put one foot ahead of the next and to go on. Vultures followed them. The last horse died. The last rifle dropped in the sand. Most of them got back to the main party but none of them remembered the details. When they recovered they learned that the war was over… .

  It was a world of extremes, a lost place of antique plants and people, of primordial things; to enter the desert was to go backwards in time.

  Here were plants without leaves, misshapen, hoarding their precious moisture in thick, spine-armored stems, in bitter roots and deep tubers, behind poison thorns. They had become deformed and ugly but they could thrive and reproduce.

  Grotesque beings: tarantulas and giant beetles, spiny lizards with horns and armor, leftovers from the age of dragons and giant insects. As one goes deeper into the desert the softness of nature vanishes; the plants become fewer, armed with spikes and thorns; the insects become more virulent; savage baboons watch from their rock castles and the vultures from their vantage points. Time does not matter.

  There are exceptions.

  The gemsbok has grace and beauty. It is a horselike antelope, fast and noble, the oryx and the unicorn of fable. It can live and grow fat without ever seeing surface water. It is a gentle grazing animal but its long horns are saberlike and when it is aroused or at bay the lion backs away.

  One of them came to the canyon, remembering the pool and the strange open water; once, some summers ago, a great herd had passed here on the way south. Desert creatures do not forget forage or water.

  It came to the canyon and O’Brien shot it.

  A strange and wonderful thing: all at once they had a seemingly unlimited supply of meat.

  O’Brien had come upon it suddenly close to the water hole in the uncertain light of dawn, a great and beautiful animal standing under one of the withered trees. Its head was turned so that the two arched horns seemed as one. His first shot killed it and it fell heavily on the stony ground.

  The others came. They examined the sleek hide, the white legs which reminded them of spats, the overlong horns. Grimmelmann took O’Brien’s hunting knife and cut the animal’s throat. Fresh blood gushed forth.

  “Shall I butcher it?” he asked the big hunter.

  “Go ahead,” O’Brien told him. “I wouldn’t know what to do really. Cut it up.”

  “Go, bring some coals,” the German told Smith. “We’re going to have a feast, eat the things that are best eaten while we make biltong.”

  “Are we going to dry it?” Grace asked.

  “It’s the safest way,” Grimmelmann said. “We can hang the strips in the tree and let the sun work for us. We can keep the fire going. Some of us can remain here overnight with the meat to keep the carrion birds away.”

  Smith hurried away and the others wandered far off over the flat canyon floor picking up dead branches from under the scattered trees. The sun rose, and vultures came and circled above in the clear sky.

  Grimmelmann skinned the big animal and then, with O’Brien’s help, butchered it. The entrails were drawn and they began cutting the carcass into large manageable chunks which O’Brien wedged into forks of the nearby acacia trees. The two men were soon drenched with blood and sweat but they were hardly aware of it; they had to put the meat where the blood would drain off.

  They stopped and rested and ate, using the bloody hide as a table top and searching the entrails for tidbits, which they roasted over the fire or ate half-raw. The liver and heart and intestine. Grimmelmann smashed the heavy skull and put the brain away for his evening meal.

  The meat made them thirsty and they made frequent trips to the pool. They cut steaks and settled down to eat leisurely. The frantic gulping, the trembling, the tearing at the raw meat, was behind them. They groaned now, watching the meat curl and sizzle on the ends of their charred sticks. Now and then they would drop a piece and then rush off to the pool to wash off the sand. They would finish one piece and cut another; they stuffed themselves and after a time they drew away from the fire and found refuge in the shade, close to the meat.

  “What do we do now?” Bain said. He lay like the others on his back, lazy and hot and sleepy. He felt wonderfully bloated.

  “We’ll cut the meat into slices and let it dry,” Grimmelmann said. “We can speed up the process if we squeeze it first between flat stones.”

  “Dehydrate it,” Bain said.

  “Yes,” the old man agreed. “We let it stand in the sun. One of the big problems will be the flies. Look at them. They are laying eggs in the meat. We must build smaller fires around the carcass, fires with lots of smoke to drive them away.”

  “Yes,” Bain said. “But let’s rest awhile. I’m too full to do anything right now.” He closed his eyes. A fly settled on his bloody hand. He shook it away.

  “If we could only shoot more of these,” Smith said. “Do you think there are many around? Off in the desert?”

  “I’ve seen herds of a thousand or more,” Grimmelmann said. “But who can say where this one came from or whether we’ll see another one
?”

  “I’m glad O’Brien is a good shot,” Bain said. “Think of all this meat running away.”

  “It came here for water,” Grace said. “Why don’t we move to some other place, another canyon? We might be scaring others away with our noise, our fire, our scent.”

  Grimmelmann shrugged. “Perhaps, but I do not think so.

  The big herds are not here, deep in the desert, at this time of year. When the rain comes, when things grow again, they will return. This animal came to water. Danger and strange smells would not have turned him back. I think we should stay in the cave. It might be wise to have someone stay near the water each night with the rifle. I would be glad to.”

  “It’s a deal,” O’Brien said. “We’ve got the water and they’ve got to come to it. If we could get one of these antelopes once a week we’d be doing okay. Plenty of meat.”

  “There might be zebra,” Grimmelmann said.

  “Anything would be better than the melons,” Grace said. “They fill you up but there’s no strength in them. For the last few days I’ve had dizzy spells. I’ve felt so weak …”

  “We all have,” Bain said.

  O’Brien got up slowly, groaning. “Let’s get going before the flies carry it off.”

  They moved the fire under the low trees and the smoke drove off large numbers of flies and insects that all but covered the raw, bloody meat.

  Grimmelmann began cutting long thin strips from the big chunks of meat, handing them to the others who hung them carefully from the branches. The sun would dry it, shrink it, suck the moisture from it, and it would become tough and hard. It would not rot. They could save it, hoard it.